Relational Heart

Posted on June 4, 2016 by ehurst

It’s not that the heart does not comprehend data, but that the heart operates on a far higher level. The realm of moral imperative is not objective or impersonal, but intensely personal. The structure of heart “thinking” is relational. The heart deals in persons. Not character traits, but the living character itself.

So when you subject your intellect to the heart-mind, your primary expectation is not data, though it may include that, but your primary expectation is relational. It’s not a question of, “What is this and what does it do?” It’s a question of, “Who are you?”

This is why we emphasize that Creation is alive. It is alive broadly in itself, but alive in every detailed aspect. You encounter a world of persons, not facts. Time and space take on entirely different meanings, as reality now means you are among friends and allies in Creation who don’t suffer your fallen nature, along with a relative few humans who are also fallen like you.

However, in the heart-mind is the potential for truly understanding each other, humans in particular. You encounter them as people, too. If your ambient world of living creatures rises up above the status of background and scenery, then surely every human is something more than background and scenery, and more than mere machinery. They become real people.

And this is why we live. Not to gather facts and mastery, but to reach out and touch living beings. We seek to restore justice to our world because that is where the glory of God shines. The treasure is not mastery over externalities, but over self, over the resistance of our broken self also in need of justice. Your heart brings justice to your self.

And justice is alive, breathing and growing in your soul.

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Keep It in the Heart

Posted on June 4, 2016 by ehurst

The Ancient Near East in general, and the Hebrew people in particular, bore an ancient legacy of the heart-mind. While it’s obvious not everyone was heart-led, it is also obvious that Scripture took seriously the existence of the heart-mind as the core of human awareness in this world. Thus, we see frequent references to a “purity of heart” that translates roughly to a clarity of commitment.

So the entire Law of Moses presumes the heart as the highest faculty of human awareness. You could obey the Law without it and probably get by in a Covenant Nation, but you would never understand what the Law was for. It was designed to prepare the mind for proper obedience from the heart. It conditioned the mind to think along the lines of the moral fabric in Creation, God’s moral character. Thus, the mind was properly prepared to respond and implement from this frame of reference the demands of conviction.

Paul assumes this heart-led awareness in his writing. Not that he expected every Gentile to already have it, but that his writing makes little sense without first engaging that higher faculty. His writing presumes an awareness of the very personal nature of things. Not subjective as Western minds conceive of it, but that Creation was alive, and that all things in it were alive; every human experience bore a life of its own. He presumes you understand that spirituality was not cerebral, but a personal and living communion with God. Justice cannot be objectified, but is inherently a matter of personal communion with the Person of God. It’s organic and alive; that’s the nature of reality. Nothing is inert and passive in that worldview. The dominating assumption about reality is that all things are alive and in some sense sentient. That’s the logic on which the heart operates.

Thus, we follow Christ — not as a body of principle, but as a living Person who might as well be walking alongside us every moment of the day. He is the ultimate expression of what the Law meant to offer us. I wrote in my notes on Galatians:

Paul lays the theological foundation for declaring the Law of Moses dead. This is not about good deeds in general, but specifically about the Law of Moses and particularly as expressed in Pharisaical teachings. While we might find that the original Law of Moses symbolized a path to spiritual truth, the Law itself was not that truth. To further remove the Law by making it an empty ritualistic observance as practiced by the Pharisees was utterly pointless. That sort of religion was wholly an effort by man to please a false god of human imagination, a perverted image blasphemously labeled “Jehovah.”

The Law was a gateway, awakening the need for spiritual redemption. Observing Moses had nothing to do directly with saving souls from eternal damnation. It was a system by which deeper truth could be discovered, but the system required a nation to live it. Israel failed miserably, losing it for herself and for everyone who should have looked to them for answers. Pharisaism only deepened their loss. For that reason, God sent His Son to pay the price for our sins, to make a path to come before Him and receive His holiness as a grant of grace. Christ joined lawful and faithful living into a continuity with eternity. A new standard of holiness would arise from a completely new covenant. Every element of the Old Covenant was under review; the Talmud was rejected flatly as a perversion before that process began. Pharisaical Jews doing their best according to the Talmud stand doubly condemned. If God requires that they find their salvation by faith in Christ, how could returning to the Pharisaical Law bring any hope to Gentiles? For a Christian to cling to the Talmud was saying Jesus sponsored sin.

Today we hardly suffer the infestation of the Judaizers as in those days. Instead, most of the mainstream Christian religion is so deeply Judaized that we have to start from scratch all over again. And with the First Century Christians, we don’t organize to dismantle the old dead religion, but we simply move away and hope to attract a few who might notice that we aren’t under that bondage any longer. I don’t know if we should expect a fresh wave of “Judaizers” to infiltrate our work these days, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Keep it in the heart and keep it mystical.

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Paul’s Letters Continued

Posted on June 3, 2016 by ehurst

Yesterday I finished reviewing my Bible study notes on 2 Corinthians. It stands as the single most powerful statement for the otherworldly perspective for Christian faith. I look back over the years of Christian teaching I received in different churches and still shake my head. They make much of the words, but then define them to death so that the direct assertions become shadowy suggestions. In the end, you could have a fat guy in an expensive suit, who drove to church in an expensive car, justifying his pursuit of worldly wealth as fully in keeping with Scripture. “You can’t just throw away everything! You have to take care of your family.”

Nobody says you have to play at communist property redistribution, but all the examples these clowns cited were so trite and unrealistic that it disemboweled Paul’s flat assertions about not taking in stride suffering and sorrow. The most powerful gift you can give your children is not a prosperous future, but a demonstration of faith to live in defiance of materialism. “Salvation” is not eternal fire insurance; it starts with the sacrificial living here and now.

Today I’ll be working on Galatians, wherein Paul flatly states that Christians are the New Israel, and that the Old Israel is now nothing more than history lessons. Dispensationalists offer some of the most tortured reading of this letter.

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Progress: Energy

Posted on June 2, 2016 by ehurst

I noticed yesterday how my whole leg often retains fluid so that it’s visibly fatter than the other. So I began working on avoiding situations that promoted that kind of swelling. For example, when sitting at my computer I cannot simply rest the foot on the floor, but elevate the leg at least up near hip level. While this also promotes temporary stiffness, that’s easy to overcome. I’ve also been using my old Swedish vibrator on the whole leg.

A few days ago things got to the point where I realized my calf and most of my quadriceps felt like torn muscles. It’s not important to dig into why, but it did indicate directions for treatment to progress. That means the old three-finger penetrating rub across the most sensitive muscle fibers, followed up with that vibrator. I’m also enlarging the places where I rub in the comfrey root tincture to include the muscles that hurt most.

Finally, I’m also including a few periods of resting on my back with feet propped up rather high.

The other thing was that I’ve actually moved beyond the prescribed physical therapy exercises. Anyone with experience in fitness, who reads some of the exercise physiology stuff, can figure out what the therapy exercises are meant to do. So it got to the point those exercises were piddly, and I started pushing back into my hard training movements, but adding motions that extend the effect of the therapy exercises.

And while it has been coming on slowly for a a couple of weeks, this morning the urge to get my butt into gear was a palpable twitch. Now I actually feel like working out, and hard. I’m taking the time to walk more strenuously and thinking through the natural motion so that the leg re-learns normal walking. Sometimes I’ll do high-knee lifts and allow the lower leg to dangle against the stiffness that resists bending the knee. At times I’ll stop and do some squatting, stopping when the knee starts to hurt. There is a sticking point around the 90° angle, but once or twice it has nudged just past it.

I still have a ways to go, but it’s progress.

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Ditch the Systematic Theology

Posted on June 2, 2016 by ehurst

“What must I do to be saved?”

We see this question from the Philippian Jailer in Acts 16:30. The question itself arose from Greek culture. It became a figure of speech, so the actual meaning varies with the context. It was intentionally ambiguous in the sense that it was seeking whatever divine rescue was available, asking what were the terms. The jailer was hardly unaware of the plethora of Eastern religions represented across the Mediterranean in those days. He knew that people connected to Judaism were also part of that broad collection of Eastern mystical religions. Since he saw the power of something beyond human ken and these men were confident and at peace, he wanted some of whatever it was that set them free but kept them from escaping and getting him in trouble.

In Western culture, the question has taken on a rather precise theological meaning that builds on a false foundation. Bear with me a moment while I try once again to untangle this.

Ancient Near Eastern thought presumes a Spirit Realm separate from this realm of existence. Western thought presumes this universe is it, in the sense that there could be no other kind of universe. In other words, Western thought negates any kind of Spirit Realm a priori. This assumption is not discussed in the existing ancient literature (so far as I know) that teaches Greek philosophy. They didn’t bother to argue against it for the most part. Thus, it is a part of the package of assumptions about reality on which the rest of their stuff stands. When this Hellenized approach collided with the already weakened moral reasoning of the rabbinical schools of Hebrew religion (they had already been influenced by Babylon and Persia during the Exile), they were overwhelmed by the sheer intellectual thrill of analytical reasoning. The mind was back on the throne, and it loves to rule. But it bore the poisoned root of rejecting the Spirit Realm.

Judaism is the result of this collision. It is not the Hebrew religion of ancient times. Mixing Hellenism with Hebrew traditions results in legalism. The mystical was trashed in favor of nit-picking over particulars. What to do with the Spirit Realm? It became by default a spooky place rather like the myths of River Styx and the place of the dead. And how many times have you read discussions of sheol that equate it wrongly with the Greek mythology? Instead of the mystical Hebrew approach, God and Heaven became something akin to Plato’s realm of the Ideal, an entirely cerebral construct. It was all objectified.

Now, we are naturally unable to explain a mystical truth, but in the Hebrew mind, there is a sense in which the Spirit Realm has continuity with our realm of existence here. The Spirit Realm is ultimate reality, as it were, while our existence is the Realm of Shadows. We are forced to use parabolic language, but we do know that your manner of life here reflects something about your eternal destiny with God. Insofar as you are damned here, you are damned eternally. Even then, I’m using a figure of speech. What the Hellenized approach does is break that continuity and substitutes a false conceptual continuity that yields to reason.

So we see all kinds of a prior assumptions that attempt to force God into the boundaries of reason. Common Western (Protestant-Catholic) conceptions of Heaven are persistently Platonic in nature. Theologians can hardly break out of that track without a lot of study in what it means to be Western and what Western thought looks like from the perspective of non-Western intellectual traditions.

But this a priori assumption that equates God with Plato’s Ideal means all Western theology is infected with the notion that God has to make sense. Thus, we have a duty to reason about God and create Theology. We have to explore all the possible particulars by analysis and explain everything. And so we have a theology of how people are “saved” — soteriology. And we have this rational delineation of logical steps that ends up making God the creator of evil. Most Western theologians deny this because it breaks some of the other rules of logic, but the paradox is inevitable if you approach God from a rational foundation.

I can tell you how I backed out of that hellhole; that’s what some of my books are about. Maybe some of it will echo your own situation and I can help you escape. The Hebrew word most often translated as “saved” is rooted in the idea of escaping something.

The fundamental concept of moral human sorrow in the Hebrew Scripture is “separation.” You are separated from God. We were meant to be fit for His Presence, but somehow humanity got off on the wrong foot. So we start out alienated from Him. The mystical truth of how that problem is solved was never meant to be reduced to descriptive language. There are no steps to salvation that everyone can follow. All any of us can do is demonstrate what it’s like to live in peace with God. We allow Him to work things His way from His end and hope that means you find a path to peace. We don’t pretend to tell folks “how” to be saved, only to demonstrate what it looks like. We already know that there is no “how.” If you are going to get it at all, it has to come from something unique to you and God. Nobody has a clue what-when-why-how He decides to offer terms of peace, only that He does.

So the answer the Apostles gave to the Philippian Jailer was symbolic, not a precise HOWTO. He would have understood it that way soon enough, if not already. Despite his being bathed directly in Hellenist culture, the historical context included a lot of stuff we no longer have around.

And do you know how hard Western theologians struggle over that business of “you and your household”? When you objectify “salvation,” you are forced into cerebral gymnastics. How can one man’s decision affect the eternal salvation of his family members? Ditch the objectification of salvation and the whole thing takes on a different meaning. Since the man clearly worried about his moral standing, the Apostles presumed he was primed to take the heart-led moral path to God’s character. If he takes that path, it must include his entire household over which he holds moral dominion. That word “salvation” means walking in a heart-led moral truth, not some objectified status change in the Ideal. If someone begins instituting the changes inherent in heart-led moral commitment, who on earth could suggest that man is not at peace with God? So we are back to that mystical continuity I mentioned earlier.

That’s how we are saved.

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Tech Talk: Can’t Get It

Posted on June 1, 2016 by ehurst

This morning I was cruising a news site. Right in the middle of reading different articles on the site, it suddenly stopped responding. I checked first at Down for Just Me?, a site that checks whether the server on the other end is running and connected to the internet. It said, “It’s just you” — meaning that it was working just fine, so the blockage was somewhere between me and the news site server.

Now, it could be any number of things: Cox’s DNS is flaky (often), interference among the many traffic handlers along the route between us, maybe active denial by a third party, or who-knows-what. So the next step was to use a proxy server. If you check your favorite search engine using the term “free proxy server” you should get a good list of sites that will help you get around most of that stuff. I used Free Proxy Net. This is simply a server with a better connection to the net that also provides you with a mask so that the server on the other end has no idea who actually wants access. Since I had no idea what the trouble was and didn’t feel like spending an hour hacking and diagnosing it, the proxy server was the simplest answer and I was able to read the articles I wanted.

Granted, a proxy server often blocks things like JavaScript so that the page you request doesn’t display normally and might act a little funny when you click on stuff. It still works pretty well for most uses. It’s a useful thing to know about proxy servers, all the more so as governments seek ways to censor stuff they don’t want us seeing.

For example, this story about Israel Demands World Internet Censorship is buzzing on the not-so-mainstream tech sites. It’s not exactly news, given how Israel is demanding various governments censor things like the BDS Movement. You may be aware that some governments and large institutions are forbidding and punishing promotion of BDS. I’ve heard tales of church staff harassing anyone who mentions it. By extension, no one is surprised to see that Israel is trying to build up an international coalition to enforce Israel’s information control policies on the internet. It starts with the most obvious anti-terror stuff, but who would be foolish enough to believe it will stop there?

Our virtual parish relies entirely on the internet, of course, so this is like keeping an eye on zoning laws that might close down your church.

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Suffering Is Your Ally

Posted on May 31, 2016 by ehurst

From my study notes on 2 Corinthians 1:

It seems unfortunate we translate the Greek word (paraklesis) simply as "comfort" in English, because the typical associations with that word miss the point. The Greek word is both the invocation of someone’s assistance, and the assistance delivered. The Holy Spirit, often called by the related term "Comforter" (paraklete), is One who by His nature draws you up out of yourself. When you call upon God, He calls you to Himself. That primary form of assistance and comfort is to make you see you need not care about the sorrows that clamor your attention. Comfort in tribulation is rising above it mystically. We then offer that same blessing to others, helping them rise above their sorrow by climbing outside themselves. Such consolation is abundant in Christ.

Naturally, as we develop a stronger immunity to worldly sorrows, we should expect those sorrows to abound. What kind of reward is that? Wrong question. God sends more sorrows because that is how He executes His wrath on sin. If this drives you deeper into despair, it is because you cling too much to this life. If it drives you farther from your old self, you should expect more of it as the sorrows succeed in their mission. Our sorrows abound, but our "comfort" abounds the more, as we pull farther and farther away from the false and fallen world around us. Yes, the whole point is to make you even more otherworldly, more "out of touch" from things which only hinder His Kingdom. Paul sincerely hopes they understand this, so the same deep blessings can fall on them.

This is a sample of moral reasoning in the heart. The objective is to become less attached to this world, so suffering and sorrow make sense. They are your friends.

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It’s Always the Product

Posted on May 31, 2016 by ehurst

Reading through the stories on Christian news sites is really depressing.

Back when I went to teacher’s college in the 1990s, there was this trendy nonsense: “It’s process, not product.” When some of the professors started saying that about our classwork, too, it was an obvious lie. It was always about the product, but they felt compelled to echo the propaganda. Only a few dim-witted students bought into that nonsense because no one could do it.

But it’s no different with church activities. Christians have been promoting that same lie for centuries. When you scan the latest stories on sites claiming to offer specifically Christian oriented news stories, you get inundated with stuff about the products: better efficiency, more people joining the program, more donations coming into the program, bigger names attached to the program, more precise theology, etc. Oh, and of course, the Lord added to their numbers daily, they say with all pious reverence.

All of those stories are about religion, not faith. Yes, it’s the same old thing of perverting the word “faith” by adding tons of baggage tied to human religious activity. Their faith is in the religious activity, not in the God who speaks convictions to the individual heart.

So-n-so died and she was such a saint, except she wasn’t; she was a gold-digging buffoon just like her famous TV husband. Some preacher with a franchise of dozens of megachurch facilities warns other preachers not to build too many too fast when their ministry starts to grow — he doesn’t like competition. This new book will help you teach your congregation how to give more to missions. That same book pretends to elevate to sainthood somebody who went to some heathen land on CIA sponsorship, pretending to be a missionary. Some famous TV preacher spouts more hateful “prophecy” and never admits that his ministry provided cover in Africa for several different government spying agencies. And yet another big church minister wraps his greedy and hateful rhetoric in the US flag so folks won’t notice someone on his staff used their church office computer to trade in child porn.

Here’s the difference: You and I know how badly broken we are and confess it openly when appropriate. We don’t pretend to be saintly examples. We struggle with our own sins daily. But we tend to believe that such is the whole purpose and meaning of faith. We need no monuments to our religious stardom. Our religion is shaped to turn our own lives around, because we know there is absolutely no other way we can help anyone else. We don’t try to impress folks with numbers, facilities and money, but with how powerful faith can be when you abandon all that other stuff.

Faith is in the process, not the products man can measure.

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Duty to Deceive

Posted on May 30, 2016 by ehurst

First, a little context: faith = convictions = heart-mind moral discernment. We’ve had two millennia of people abusing the word “faith” to mean an intellectual body of belief plus the actions arising from such belief. It goes back to that false duality of “being” and “doing” as opposed to simply living. Faith is a higher faculty from which the mind can draw implications, but what the mind makes of it is not faith.

I struggle often to help people break down the old mental habits. It’s not easy to make Western minds, American in particular, grasp the organic life model of thinking about reality. There is no such thing as inert matter; it’s all buzzing with the life of God. We can keep trying, but no one can get it without an active connection between heart and mind. It remains a mystery to outsiders.

In the New Testament, the word “mystery” has a special meaning based on the underlying Greek word musterion. A word study is not going to help much because it’s not a matter of linguistics. The New Testament use of the word is parabolic. Something is a “mystery” because the intellect cannot handle it directly. A biblical mystery is something that only the heart of faith can grasp. It’s not a secret, but it’s veiled to those whose minds are closed to the heart-mind. Faith can be manifested in word and action, but no thoughts can hope to define it.

This is the hard part for most Westerners: Ultimate Truth is God’s character, not a body of knowledge. It’s the Person of God Himself. When Hellenism was injected into Hebrew rabbinical studies, God was objectified and His truth was reduced to reason. Thus, the Pharisees worshiped their reasoning about God, not God Himself. It was a blasphemous idolatry that wasn’t obvious to anyone who wasn’t heart-led.

So we say that Jesus is God incarnate, but those words can deceive; that choice of words offers an excuse to drag Him down into the reason. Rather, with Hebrews 1:1-4 let us affirm that Jesus was the most accurate human manifestation of God’s character. It’s really not that different from the first few verses of John’s Gospel. The idea is not to define Jesus, as if to place boundaries that distinguish intellectually. Rather, it’s intended to leave your mind behind and speak to the heart. What we learn is that, if we can absorb the character of Jesus in our hearts, we can participate in revelation. You don’t learn about God through your mind; you become aware of His divine nature in your convictions.

You could theoretically learn every fact and master all human theoretical science and still not have a clue what matters. Only moral truth can give purpose to human existence, and God is the sole source of moral truth. He is moral truth. Our business is to manifest His glory in our feeble broken lives by His overwhelming power. Following Christ means just that. So now it means something when we read Hebrews 11:1 — “Faith is the substance of God’s promises, the evidence of things our senses cannot discern.” Faith is more than enough to bring about action that trusts promises more than sense and reason.

Thus, the full intent of our actions in this world is revelation. We know that most of our world cannot receive the truth directly the way we do from a personal communion with God, so we offer hints of that truth with our actions. We live to disclose, to uncover the mystery.

Contrast this with various forms of human behavior that mandate secrecy. I’ve often made much of how bureaucracy takes on a life of its own because the foundation is fear of accountability. Everyone is taught to hide themselves in the hive. Only on the rarest occasions can any single person defy the bureaucracy from within and expose the secret details. It wouldn’t be so bad if bureaucrats would simply obey their bosses, but the whole thing is shot through with a culture of hiding the truth, even from each other, and especially from bosses. In a certain sense, nobody inside of a bureaucracy knows the truth. It’s just one big blob and everyone loses their true identity; there are no individuals.

There are plenty of religions and quasi-religions that keep secrets in a similar fashion. Some have the practice of lying to outsiders enshrined in plain statements in their religious teachings, if you can find the references. They tend to hide that, and will flatly deny it most of the time, but you read their scriptures for yourself and see it plainly stated. For them, it’s a command from their god(s) to deceive outsiders to protect the religious organization from defilement. Some of the awfullest things you can imagine, and maybe some you can’t imagine, are done inside those secrecy wrappings. They have a duty to deceive lest they lose their divinely ordained blessings and privileges. (Need I mention that mainstream Christians are generally hypocritical about deception?)

While I offer links highlighting two groups notorious for mutual hostility, it isn’t hard to find similar material from a lot of religions and secret organizations with the declared intention of taking over the world. We do not confuse Creation with “this world.” Humanity (this world) is fallen, but Creation is not. We reverence God’s character in His Creation, but we know He has plans to end this world, and has commanded us not to become too attached to it. We have no stake in the warlike plans of others aiming to take over this world because, ultimately, this world as we know it is a deception in itself.

We have a duty to declare.

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Factions and Sects

Posted on May 29, 2016 by ehurst

After the initial opening in 1 Corinthians 1, Paul immediately jumps into condemning sectarian divisions in verse 10 and following.

It’s not hard to understand. The Corinthians detected intellectual variations in how the different apostles taught and preached. And why not? Paul was a bilingual PhD Pharisee, Apollos was an Alexandrian scholar, Peter was no kind of scholar at all, and Christ clung to Ancient Hebrew thinking. But in the cerebral approach of the Corinthians to matters of religion, different styles meant different doctrines.

When you get any mainstream Christian leader to read this same passage and he starts talking about how we need to end sectarianism. But what he really mean is that everyone should dissolve their clubs and join his. “Well, isn’t it obvious? Our way is the right one!” Should any of those actually make it to Heaven, I think they’ll be shocked at who else is there waiting for them.

This is the standard human-oriented tribalism. When you shift from your head to your heart in matters of faith, you automatically start looking for common threads that tie it all together. That’s how the heart-mind works. Feel free to choose any styling and flavor that meets your human needs and offers the best tools for living your faith. What really matters is the power of your faith visible to the eyes of the heart. Heart-led people will always recognize each other — or at least they could if they progress far enough away from the dominance of their intellects.

Too many folks reading Paul’s Corinthian Letters are too much Corinthians themselves.

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